Boost Resilience, Decrease Stress, and Improve Your Performance

[MUSIC PLAYING] SARAH GREEN: Welcome to the Harvard Business IdeaCast. I’m Sarah Green from HarvardBusinesa.org, and today, talking with Stu Friedman, Practice Professor of Management at the Warton School, founding director of Wharton’s Work Life Integration Project and the former head of Ford Motors leadership development center. He’s the author of the book, Total Leadership, and a regular contributor to HarvardBusiness.org.

Today, we’ll be discussing ways for you to manage stress and increase your resilience, while still maintaining high standards of performance.

Stu, thanks so much for joining us today.

STU FRIEDMAN: Thanks for having me, Sarah. It’s great to be here.

SARAH GREEN: It seems like, especially in today’s wild economy, we’re increasingly hearing about the importance of resilience, a leader’s ability to bounce back from the stress caused by setbacks. But I wonder if we’re going about that in, sort of, the wrong way? Rather than coping after the fact, isn’t it better to prevent these problems before they start?

STU FRIEDMAN: Yeah. That’s a great question, Sarah. The key to building resilience and continuing to enhance your capacity to deal with rapid change is continual learning and self assessment. So the more you know about what makes you tick, and what you’re good at, and where your vulnerabilities are, and to draw on the support of people and other resources around you, the easier it is for you to adapt when things change, like when the rug gets pulled out from under you. So an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, I think the saying goes. And I think that certainly holds when it comes to mental health, as well as physical health.

SARAH GREEN: When you talk about self assessment, are you talking about a 360 review?

STU FRIEDMAN: The most useful kinds of assessment combine looking inside at your core values and what you stand for, and what matters most to you, your real priorities in life, not just at work, but in all the different parts of your life, in addition to a sense of how the people around you see you, and what they need from you. And what you can provide to them to make them more successful. So it’s really a combination of a an inside look as well as an outside in look, taking the perspective of other people.

And that’s the hardest thing for most people to do, to take what I call that leadership leap, where you look at yourself through the eyes of others.

SARAH GREEN: So I’m curious. That sounds good, but can you be a little more concrete in, maybe, a specific way that someone would go about doing that?

STU FRIEDMAN: Well, usually when you undertake a process like this it’s good to have a coach, or a friend, or other people, who are doing the same thing that you’re doing to do with you. But there are a number of different exercises, some of which I described in my book, that you can do, first to look inside and to ask yourself, what do I really care about? So one way to do that is to recount the critical episodes of your life; the 4 or 5 really life defining moments that turned you into the person you are today. What happened in those critical episodes? And how did those incidents, or stories, shape who you are today, in terms of what you care about? What you believe in?

Another way is to look forward in your life and imagine it’s 15 years hence. What’s the legacy you’re creating for the world? What impact are you having in the different parts of your life, at work, as well as at home, and in the community. So that’s another way to get a read on what you care about today, by imagining what the future is in a world where you have things the way that you want them.

Another exercise is to choose somebody who you admire and to describe that person. And then to say to yourself well, what is it about the person that I want to emulate? So the qualities or attributes of other people that you admire personally. That’s another way to get at, well then, who am I as a leader? What is my core identity? What do I stand for? What do I value most?

There are other ways, in addition. But those are some very helpful activities where you write, talk about what you’ve written, and learn from the dialogue, as well from your own self reflection. In terms of gathering a better view, a more realistic view, of how other people see you, what I recommend, and what I guide you through in the middle part of my book, which is about being whole, respecting the whole person, is you identify who are the most important people in your life; at work, at home, and the community. The four or five people in each of these different domains, aspects of your life that I call your key stakeholders, and sketch out to yourself what do they expect of me in terms of my performance, what I bring to them? And what do I expect of them?

So you look at the system of expectations that you operate in, in your inner circle; the people who matter most to you, at work, at home, and in the community, including your friends, neighbors, people in your social or religious groups. And that gives you, right there, a very interesting, and usually for most people, a new and refreshing view of where there’s conflict and where there is compatibility among the different expectations that you’re trying to meet as a leader in the different parts of your life, trying to mobilize people towards something valuable, something useful, something you care about, something that’s good for them, as well as for you.

But the really useful part comes when you prepare for and conduct what I call stakeholder dialogues, where you actually talk to each of these people. In a short conversation, half hour or so, where the intent is to discover, and get a more realistic grip on, what the people around you that you care most about, what they actually expect of you. Not what you think they expect of you. And what you’re going to discover if you do that, is that, what they expect of you is probably a little bit different and a little bit less than what you thought they expect of you.

SARAH GREEN: And is that, in turn, how that actually helps you manage your stress or prevent problems?

STU FRIEDMAN: Exactly. So when you take the combination of what you discover about yourself that matters most with a realistic and more grounded appraisal of what the people around you really need from you, what that leaves you with is opportunities to experiment with different ways of getting things done that enable you to focus more on the things that matter and to get rid of the things that don’t. And that is certainly a critical means of, and a very effective means of, reducing pressure and stress.

SARAH GREEN: So these seem like solid ideas for managing oneself. But I’m curious for people who are leading teams, how can you help dial down the stress level for your employees, the other people on your team? Or is that their responsibility?

STU FRIEDMAN: Well, that last part of the question is a really important aspect of it. I think it’s both. I think as a person, an executive, or supervisor, or managerial role, you’ve got a responsibility to get the most out of your people, and to develop them. And to help them to see how they can best contribute to your collective goals.

So one of the ways you do that is to let them know that it is, indeed, their responsibility to be experimenting with how things get done so that they can integrate work with the rest of their lives in a way that all the pieces win. But that happens most effectively when, as the manager, you, not only support, but encourage people to let them tell you their ideas for experimenting with how things get done that are going to enable them to do it better and to make it easier for them to contribute to your goals while also meeting other demands in their lives.

So it’s really a combination of you’re, as a manager, saying to your people, I want you to be experimenting with how you get things done. I want you to live a full, rich life. And what you contribute to our group, our organization, is critical to me. So let’s figure out the best way to get that done. And the way that it happens with you might be different than the way it happens with your co worker.

So I’m a firm believer in variation in work arrangements that suits the individual, and serves the collective interest.

SARAH GREEN: Now I’m curious, since we’ve been talking about reducing stress, can you go too far? Is some stress necessary for keeping performance high?

STU FRIEDMAN: Yes. There’s a long standing research tradition on how much stress is good stress. And the basic finding in that literature is this. That you want a moderate level of stress to get the best performance out of people. So if it’s too low, then there’s not enough motivation to really kick in and do a great job. If the stress is too high though, it’s disabling and you burn out, and you get distracted. So what you need to calibrate– and this is part of the fine art of managing that you get better at with practice and paying attention– is how to modulate the stress level so that it’s not too little, but also not too high.

SARAH GREEN: You know, we’re talking about finding the right balance and implementing these different experiments, but I can easily see some of these suggestions going the way of our best New Year’s resolution, that we, sort of, kick to the curb by February. So if you want to make these changes permanent, how do you make sure that you stick with it?

STU FRIEDMAN: Maintaining your ability to continually experiment so that the goal is to get better at adapting to change. In other words, to be a better learner, a faster learner, so that you’re always experimenting with different ways of getting things done. And the way you continue to grow that strength is through practice and accountability.

So building in a structure for accountability, pressure and support, so a combination of people who both push you and challenge you, and to whom you need to report, with support, encouragement, ideas, commiseration when you’re struggling, that’s really the key. So building in a social network that provides support. And it can be as simple as saying to your friend, I’m going to try this new way of working where I’m going to be coming a little bit earlier and leaving a little bit later most days of the week. But then one afternoon, I’m going to be away from the office. And that’s going to allow me to take care some things outside of work, and, ultimately, be more productive. And I’m going to try that for a month. I agreed with my boss that I’m going to try that for a month. And if my performance doesn’t improve with this change in our schedule, well then, go back to the way things were. We’ll try something different. And so my boss has agreed to try that.

Now what happens when you start to continue to stay later, later, later, and you don’t hold to your agreement to yourself? And the other things that you needed to like, I don’t know, take yoga class? It just falls by the wayside. Well, it’s a lot harder to do that if you’ve got to tell your coach, your buddy, as you’re going through this, hey I screwed up yesterday. And I stayed late. And it’s really costing me today, because I’m off my plan.

So when you make a commitment, a public commitment, to a course of action with people whose opinion you care about, it’s a lot harder to let it slip. You can fool yourself very, very easily. And we all do this all the time. But if you build in accountability, pressure, and support, through an intimate social network of coaches that you respect and who have credibility, and who care about you, it’s a lot easier to kind of stay on a path of improving your capacity to lead.

SARAH GREEN: I can’t help and is easing through one of the few men working in this space of work and life. I’m curious to know if, when you’re dealing with people and coaching them on this stuff, if you notice a difference in the way that your male students and your female students, or clients, approach these issues?

STU FRIEDMAN: Well, what I’ve done in the last 10 or 15 years or so is to bring together the fields of work, life integration with leadership development. And so the book, and the process that I’ve created, and that I’ve been teaching in my classes, and in companies around the world now, is one that combines these two. And it’s about leading in all the different parts of your life. So it’s improving performance in all the different parts of your life. I don’t really talk about work, life balance so much as I talk about how can you improve your performance against the expectations of the key stakeholders in your life. And that starts with work and it includes family, and includes community, and it includes your own private self, your mind, body and spirit. All these different elements matter in different degrees, for different people. And there’s a lot of variation within men and within the group of people who are women as to what they care about and how they go about trying to integrate all the different pieces.

So one of the things that I’ve done is to eliminate the work life language, and to talk, instead, about improving performance, and leading for results, in the different parts of your life. And that, in fact, makes it easier, in my experience, for men to access this content and this approach, because we’re not talking about work slash life, which tends to evoke a trade off, and a women’s issue kind of mentality. And I think that’s damaging.

What I’ve discovered is that, particularly in the last 5 to 10 years, it’s much more legitimate for men to be addressing these issues. So there’s less of a stigma associated with the variations in work arrangements, especially with the advent of the digital revolution.

And if you look at The New York Times this morning, there was an article about how the US Army is teaching emotional intelligence, to try to help build capacity in soldiers for becoming more emotionally and mentally healthy and resilient. So I think we’re seeing a real shift in both the business, and military, and other sectors of our society, where the so called softer side of getting things done has become much, much more important, and a legitimate arena for all of us to be focusing our attention on.

SARAH GREEN: And conversely, of course, as work life become seen as more about generalize leadership skill, that’s going to benefit women, too. Stu, thanks so much for joining us today.

STU FRIEDMAN: It’s been my pleasure, Sarah. Thanks so much for having me.

SARAH GREEN: That was Stu Friedman, from The Wharton School. For more on Stu, go to Blogs.HarvardBusiness.org slash Friedman. And as always, our email address is IdeaCast@HarvardBusiness.org. Thanks.